


One Day

by Caepio



Category: Antony and Cleopatra - Shakespeare, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF, Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate History, Ancient Egypt, Ancient History, Ancient Rome, Corpses, Death, Gen, Ghosts, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, No Explanations, Past Character Death, Past Relationship(s), Present Tense, Random & Short, Resurrection, Reunions, Vampires, warnings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 02:00:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7994524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caepio/pseuds/Caepio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Everyone like us, who dies like we do, gets their warning. Listen. Don’t you hear it in the distance? Your god is leaving you Antony.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Day

Antony swore, jerking back from the lamp he’d set a flame too, color leaping up around the room as the light reached it. He wasn’t alone. There was a man. Standing in the corner, stock still like he’d been there since dawn. But no one who looked like that saw the sun. In the shadow he might have looked like a corpse. In the light he looked like blue marble. Not alive. But then he moved. It was a slight thing. Lips parting, but no breath, eyelids flickering. Preternatural life seeping into his cold limbs, like light flickering constantly on still water. Antony was too horrified to find it beautiful.  


Dark hair brushed back by icy fingers, muscles moving, weight shifting slightly forward, and a cold, so freezing cold, smile. “One day, Antony. What are you going to do with it? One day’s a fair warning, I thought. So what are you going to do? One day. One night. Well-“ A slowly arched eyebrow, “Half a night, I suppose.”  


“You’re dead.” Antony bites out, his back to the wall, the desk between them, “You’re burned and buried. Your pretty mouth swallowed by the ocean. I saw it happen. I made sure. Go back to the bottom of the ocean and stay there.”  


“You never did well with old lovers did you?”  


“Not ones that are supposed to be dead.”  


“Supposed to be. You were so sick of my ‘supposed to bes’.”  


“What do you want?”  


“Nothing.”  


“Corpses don’t show up because of nothing.” Antony’s hand reaches for the desk drawer and the dagger he keeps there.  


“I’m not coming near you.” There is a soft sigh of exasperation, or maybe a laugh. Antony didn’t think much of either.  


“What do you mean ‘one day’”  


“You. You’ve got one day left.”  


“One day left? Of what? Are you going to kill me, Brutus? Did you finally work up the nerve? Do corpses have nerve?”  


There was a cracking, burning sound, dragged up from a knife edge throat, pain and mockery, “Oh no- You see…You’re going to kill yourself. Tomorrow.”  


“Why?”  


“You choose a reason. You have enough of them.”  


“And Cleopatra?”  


“Ah ah. You don’t get to hear about anyone else. When their day comes they’ll have their warning. This is yours.”  


“And what about you, did you get a warning? Does everyone get a warning?” Still disbelieving. Warm anger bleeding into Antony’s words. Opium highs and drunken sprawls - this sort of thing is never real. And the cold fear always melts in the morning.  


“Everyone like us, who dies like we do, gets their warning. Listen. Don’t you hear it in the distance? Your god is leaving you Antony.”  


There is music in the streets, tangling in the curtains that catch the wind behind Brutus.  


“I’m nothing like you.” Antony chokes out. The music is fading. A slow rhythmic drumming, almost inaudible.  


“Aren’t you going to listen? It will be gone before Orion sinks. It’s your music. And this is the last you’ll get to hear of it.”  


Antony doesn’t move, his fingers gripping the edge of the desk till his bones show white through his skin, “Why does it have to be you?”  


Brutus smiles, and Antony feels the fine hair on the back of his neck rise, a chill running down his spine as if the almost-corpse had touched him. “One day, Antony. Try to do it right.”

**Author's Note:**

> Very vaguely inspired, a long time ago, by this poem: 
> 
> When suddenly, at midnight, you hear  
> an invisible procession going by  
> with exquisite music, voices,  
> don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,  
> work gone wrong, your plans  
> all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.  
> As one long prepared, and graced with courage,  
> say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.  
> Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say  
> it was a dream, your ears deceived you:  
> don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.  
> As one long prepared, and graced with courage,  
> as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,  
> go firmly to the window  
> and listen with deep emotion, but not  
> with the whining, the pleas of a coward;  
> listen—your final delectation—to the voices,  
> to the exquisite music of that strange procession,  
> and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.  
> -CP Cavafy


End file.
